Large organizations throughout the world now are involved in billions of transactions which include enormous amounts of text, video, graphical and other information which is being categorized, stored, accessed, processed and transferred every day. The volume of such information is continuing to grow, and a variety of techniques for managing that information have been developed. One technique for managing such massive amounts of information is the use of storage systems. Conventional storage systems include large numbers of disk drives operating under various control mechanisms to record, backup and enable reproduction of this enormous amount of data.
While these storage systems provide extraordinarily high reliability for preserving the data once a computer system has processed it, they do not provide any redundancy, security or reliability for the data before it has been stored in the storage system. With today's large computing systems, an enormous amount of data, including instructions and other information may be present in the computer system at a given instant. This data can easily be damaged by viruses, hackers, mistakes made by users, power failures, and the like. While this data is stored in the computer memory, applications operating on the computer system are creating, changing, and reading it. At the present time there is no efficient way to protect the data in the computer memory. Some particularly robust computing environments, for example those manufactured formerly by Tandem Computers, provided increased reliability. Also, many computing systems, for example servers, have redundancy for the data words stored in the memory, but this redundancy is intended to protect the data from bit errors, typically by use of error correction codes. Loss of entire words, or larger amounts of data, is not protected until data processing is completed.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system for protecting the data in the computer system before it is stored in the storage system.